Nintendo eShop Going Down For Repairs At 4 P.M.

On Christmas morning, you woke up to find a new 3DS or Wii U under the Christmas tree. You took your new console out and were just giddy with excitement over all the fun you'd be having. Well, you were giddy until you realized that Nintendo's online services were being crushed by the holiday rush. Now you're going to have to wait even longer to get online.

This morning, Nintendo addressed the eShop outages that have been affecting both Wii U and 3DS since Christmas saying that they have teams working around the clock to get them back up. Unfortunately, Nintendo will have to take both eShops down for repairs that will last 12 hours. Here's the full statement:

We sincerely apologize for the connection problems in the Nintendo eShop. We understand this is taking longer than expected, but we can assure you that providing a solution is our top priority. We are determined to make sure everyone can enjoy all that Wii U and Nintendo 3DS have to offer. In an effort to manage the high volume of traffic and ultimately improve your experience, we are temporarily taking the Nintendo eShop services offline between the hours of 4 p.m. - 4 a.m. ET. Thank you so much for your continued patience. We will keep you updated.

What's interesting about this outage is that it may have been caused by more than just the holiday rush of new systems going online. In Japan, Nintendo recently released the Pokemon Bank app that allows users to upload their Pokemon to an online storage service. When the outages started to occur, Nintendo pulled the app and said it would be put back up at a later time. As for the North American rollout of the app, well, it's now been delayed with no replacement launch date in sight:

Nintendo and The Pokémon Company International have postponed the launch of Pokémon Bank and Poké Transporter - two software applications that were originally scheduled to launch for Nintendo 3DS on Dec. 27 - due to a large volume of traffic to the Nintendo Network service. Due to the high traffic, players are having trouble setting up Nintendo Network IDs and downloading content in the Nintendo eShop on both Wii U and Nintendo 3DS. We truly regret the inconvenience, and wish to reassure everyone that providing a solution is our top priority. We apologize for the delay and thank you for your continued patience.

When the eShop goes back up at 4 a.m. tomorrow morning, all the problems should hopefully be fixed. And for those of you asking for a free game, you're not going to get it. This is Nintendo we're talking about here.